Laundry Day
by betawho
Summary: The Doctor and River being domestic at a laundromat... Things never quite turn out as planned.


"Good grief, Sweetie. How many of these do you have?" River held up a laundry basket filled to the brim with multicolored strips of cloth.

"Hey!" Bowties are cool!" he protested from the other side of the line of washing machines.

River set down the basket on a machine, then started to get a slow-growing, naughty smile on her face. She raised sparkling eyes to him. That look was making his skin itch.

"What?" he asked, defensively.

"Oh, nothing. Just thinking about all the fun we could have with _lots_ and _lots_ of bow ties," she said, her voice fairly dripping with innuendo.

"River!" he hissed, his ears bright red. "Anyone could hear you!" He looked around, but the little old man in the corner pretended not to hear them.

River sighed and heaved two bulging pillow cases up onto the machines. "And whose fault is that, Sweetie? You've been working on the Tardis laundry facilities for three days. And until you can get it to stop turning our clothes back into cotton plants and sheep, we still need clean clothes."

She glared at him. "It's either this, or I beat your jacket on a rock in a stream." It was clearly a threat. He clutched his lapels defensively.

The little old man in the corner quickly collected his socks and left.

—

They'd parked the Tardis in front of a dingy little laundromat in an abandoned strip mall. Twilight turned to night as they hauled in bags and bags of laundry. It took a while to deplete the Tardis wardrobe, but somehow they'd managed it.

River was wearing a pair of lowrider jeans and a Donald Duck T-shirt. Her figure did wonderful things for the plebeian clothing.

The Doctor blushed and turned to stare at the primitive coin machine, he looked it over everywhere, running his hands along the rusty silver box, he dug in his pockets and pulled out a handful of currency.

The triangular plastic pieces wouldn't fit. The flower shapes kept getting caught on the petals. The mechanical spider crawled away. He found a round metal coin with a triumphant, "Ah Hah!" and tried to insert the doubloon into the slot. It was too big.

River sighed. "Just sonic it, sweetie!"

He turned with an appalled look on his face. "That's stealing!" he objected.

"Then leave the doubloon."

He shrugged, dropped the priceless Spanish coin on top of the coin changer and whipped out the sonic, giving the machine a jaunty blast.

Tokens started shooting out, pinging against him and clattering away in all directions. With an "Eep!" he looked around frantically, then grabbed a cut off gallon jug from a scarred table. It was half filled with sand and cigarette butts, but it caught the tokens.

He went down the aisles putting tokens in each of the washing machines, gleefully pushing in the sliders with a satisfied "Ka-chunk!" like he was playing slot machines, or the cash drawer on an old cash register.

River rolled her eyes. She picked up the supersized box of detergent.

—

"Don't put those together, Sweetie! Not unless you want pink shorts," River said.

He looked up, his ears reddening slightly. "What's wrong with pink shorts?" he asked, far too casually.

River grinned a totally feral grin at him and prowled toward him. He bit his lip and his eyes got big.

She hooked her finger in his waistband and pulled him toward her. "Is there anything I should know?" she asked huskily. He gulped.

"No," he squeaked.

Her eyes raking speculatively up and down his long form. She reached past him, leaning far too close, brushing against him, his hands started flailing at his sides. And she pulled the bright red towel out of the whites he was stuffing into the washer.

"This isn't the Tardis laundry, we have to separate the whites and colors." She tossed the towel into a different pile. She turned back and her eyes roamed down him again.

"Pink?"

—

As the machines agitated, the Doctor prowled around the run down little laundromat. Ancient magazines were flipped through and discarded. He fixed the wobbly table legs. Read the ingredients on all the tiny detergent packages. And pulled apart a set of dryer controls that had "Out of Order" taped across them on a faded piece of notebook paper.

As he hummed happily to himself, festooned with wires and dangling knobs, poking into the confines with an abandoned metal screwdriver he'd found sitting on top of one of the machines, a young man walked in carrying a laundry basket.

He took a look at all the machines running, the young professor who was cheerfully vandalizing the dryer, and the woman who was leaning one hip against the washers, with a large gun strapped to her thigh. Smiling at him.

He turned and left.

—

One of the washing machines started shuddering, then banging, then juttering across the floor. It bulged, warped, and ripped open. A huge stalk ruptured out, shooting toward the ceiling. A Dr. Seuss candy cane stripped bole grew upward. It pressed against the ceiling, straining the surface, and burst through, showering plaster and ceiling beams.

River jumped back, and brushed gypsum out of her hair.

Roots grew out of the shattered washing machine, water flooded the floor, and one root had grown through a pocket of the Doctor's jeans, like a leg, mistakenly inserted.

The bole kept growing, climbing upward. Thirty feet above them a fluffy ball of pink alien tree leaves unfurled, fluttered like feathers in the breeze.

"Yeah," the Doctor drawled slowly, looking up from the candy machine. "Probably shouldn't have gotten those beans wet."

River turned and stared at him. "_This_ is why we didn't just send out for dry cleaning."

—

The Doctor dashed out to the Tardis, and back, holding a small handheld device. He pushed a prong into the fleshy trunk of the tree, and hit a button. The entire tree dissolved into dust, cascading down, even the dust dissolving before it hit the ground.

The machine absorbed the energy released by the the atoms unbonding, to power its next use.

"Very clever, honey," River threw the Doctor's wet trousers into another machine to finish washing.

She sighed and looked up at the hole in the roof. "You fix the machines. I'll fix the roof."

—

When the owner arrived the next morning to open he found a note taped to the door. "_Sorry about the repairs_."

Inside, he found three sparkling new washing machines installed in his line of old dented ones, a repaired dryer, a new ceiling.

And a doubloon on the coin machine.

—

Behind him, a mechanical spider crawled down the wall.

—

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